‘He woke the world up.’ Houston’s Third Ward remembers George Floyd.

Have we been here before?

The civil unrest seen across the United States since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd may be rivaled only by the chaotic summers of the late 1960s, when racial tensions, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War fueled widespread protests and rioting.

Houston – and the Third Ward, the historically black neighborhood where Mr. Floyd grew up – experienced that late ’60s unrest, including a violent encounter in 1967 on the campus of Texas Southern University (TSU), a historically black college in the Third Ward, that saw police arrest almost 500 students and shoot up a dormitory.

Race riots broke out in cities around the country in those months – a period now known as the “long, hot summer of 1967.” In a report analyzing the cause of the unrest, the Kerner Commission concluded that white Americans were largely to blame for maintaining systemic inequality between black and white Americans.

President Lyndon Johnson didn’t act on those conclusions, and a year later protests again erupted across the country – again, including Houston – after the assassination of